There are several marketing efforts related to offering incentives to promote certain customer spending behaviors. For example, a merchant may offer a loyalty program to provide rewards, such as a discount, rebate, or gift, to encourage customers to purchase from the merchant. A credit or debit card account issuer may offer a loyalty program to encourage cardholders to use the credit card from the issuer. Merchants may also integrate their own loyalty programs with a credit or debit card issuer to cooperate to offer loyalty programs to promote their respective services and products. For example, some payment card issuers have allowed or promoted the consolidation of rewards earned through customer relationships, such as hotels, airlines, oil companies, etc. These rewards are typically limited to purchases made using the payment cards from the respective account issuers. The amounts of the rewards are calculated based on the total purchase price charged to the payment card accounts. To consolidate rewards, payment card issuers or their associated merchant partners in the loyalty program may exchange information about the rewards.
Loyalty programs generally maintain an account for each customer to accumulate benefits earned by the customer in connection with activities related to the loyalty program. For instance, rewards are credited to a reward account of a consumer after the consumer performs certain actions that satisfy the rules of the loyalty program, such as by making a purchase using a particular payment credit or debit card from the account issuer providing the loyalty program or by making a purchase from a specific merchant or group of merchants sponsoring the loyalty program. Rewards can be quantified in various units, such as actual cash value, points, miles, stars, digital cash, etc.